Quotes & Sayings About Sound And Music

I listen to pop music and it sounds like mantra to me, there's this power to it. There's also something to be said about how it reaches people on a mass level, there's some magic to that. — Taraka Larson

I think I could walk into any music shop anywhere and with a guitar off the rack, a couple of basic pedals and an amp I could sound just like me. There's no devices, customized or otherwise, that give me my sound. — David Gilmour

People don't appreciate music any more. They don't adore it. They don't buy vinyl and just love it. They love their laptops like their best friend, but they don't love a record for its sound quality and its artwork. — Laura Marling

Hip-hop and electronic music are so similar, in the fact that they're both very visceral, have so much bass; a lot of times, it's the same tempos. The culture and some of the sound design is different but a lot of times, it's the same stuff. — Skrillex

This is ... an attempt to find some of the important fault lines in the narrative of "recorded history"
the points where people with access to the technology decided that *this* was how recordings should sound, and *this* is what it means to make a record. Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music
a *representation* of music
and declare it to be music itself. — Greg Milner

If you have a lot of textural stuff happening in music you get called shoegaze, or whatever, and then it becomes about the sound and not about the songs. — Tamaryn

When children ask me what's my favorite [role], I say to them, "Imagine having ten beautiful new puppies in a basket and you had to say which one is your favorite, and you simply couldn't because you love them all for different reasons." POPPINS was such a learning experience, as was THE SOUND OF MUSIC. I tell you, every one of them just helped me grow in what I do and did and each one was such a phenomenal working experience. — Julie Andrews

Beethoven
his thoughts moving at
the speed of sound
transforming emotion into music
and for a moment
it was like joy
was a tangible thing
like you could touch it
like for the first time
we could watch love and
hate dance together
in a waltz of such precision and beauty
that we finally understood
the history wasn't important
to know the man
all we ever had to do was
listen. — Shane Koyczan

Sound filled the room, a crystal melody that could lift any human heart and turn away any devil.
It was "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake. — David Wong

Yes, there was music after all. The sound of the swamp rose up to him. The sound of frogs and crickets, of birds and 'gators, of life in every puddle and pond and knothole and leaf. I Travel By Night — Robert McCammon

I'm really excited to be chosen as a VEVO LIFT artist. It's a great opportunity to reach millions more music fans with my sound and let them see the real Rita. — Rita Ora

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I've been playing music, I've been called all different kinds of fool - more times than Lobey, which is my name. — Samuel R. Delany

It takes a lot of money to make music and get it to people. It takes a lot of time to make a record sound good. — Grieves

I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music. — Charles Hazlewood

I think of myself as an experimentalist even though much of my music sounds logical and normal, in a sense. — Paul Lansky

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about. — Dwight Yoakam

There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes. — Evan Parker

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life's leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. — Thomas Merton

I know my sound, and I have to be true to who I am as an artist, even though I want be real cool, and make really cool music. — Brooke Fraser

In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks. — Steve Albini

I think people are complacent about sound, because we're so limited by the textures and timbres we hear in music, but in our everyday life we hear the most incredible things. — Herbert

Nothing is going to stay the same; nothing's gonna sound like in 1952. There's some stuff that has some elements of back in the day, like back in the 90's, back in the 80's or whatever. Some elements, but it's not going to be the same, exactly, sounding. And I love it, I've seen the music change. I've seen the flow and the energy go from turned up to turned down to back to turned up. I like to try different stuff. I don't like to do the same old thing over and over again. I don't like to be repetitive, that gets on my nerves. — Juicy J

For me life is an inn where I must stay until the carriage from the abyss calls to collect me [ ... ] I could consider this inn to be a prison, since I'm compelled to stay here; I could consider it a kind of club, because I meet other people here. However, unlike others, I am neither impatient nor sociable. I leave those who chatter in the living room, from where the cosy sound of music and voices reaches me. I sit at the door and fill my eyes and ears with the colours and sounds of the landscape and slowly, just for myself, I sing vague songs that I compose while I wait.
Night will fall on all of us and the carriage will arrive. I enjoy the breeze given to me and the soul given to me to enjoy it and I ask no more questions, look no further. If what I leave written in the visitors' book is one day read by others and entertains them on their journey, that's fine. If no one reads it or is entertained by it, that's fine too. — Fernando Pessoa

I played 'Eruption' two times for the record, and we kept the one that seemed to flow ... there's a mistake at the top end of it whenever I hear it, I always think, Man I could've played it better ... but I like the way it sounds. I'd never heard a guitar sound like that before ... — Eddie Van Halen

She removed the shining black disk from its sleeve, holding it by the edges. After she placed it on the turntable and set the arm into motion, she adjusted the volume on the amplifier, flooding the room with sound. She closed her eyes and began to sway to the music. She could almost feel Clive's arms guiding her, as he had done so many times over the course of their lives together.
(from Independence Day) — Ken Doyle

Music is like medicine. It can bring relief to the aches and stressful situations that life brings. We live in a world of music. There is sound and rhythm everywhere we go! — Ellen J. Barrier

In the rare moments I permitted any stillness, I noted a small fluttering at the pit of my belly, a barely perceptible disturbance. The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself. The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. When I did not write, I suffocated in silence. — Gabor Mate

And suddenly everything was pure sound. I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen. Will hadn't described any of it like this. I had thought I might be bored. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. And — Jojo Moyes

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. — Thomas Merton

In contemporary music, the challenge for me is to make the recorder sound as naturally expressive as, for example, the violin - without doing it too much and forcing the instrument. It is very easy to be overly expressive on the recorder, and finding the balance is quite difficult. — Michala Petri

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion. — Confucius

Loving music had pushed all of us off the track- away from the normal pursuit of career, mate, and family, on an endless quest for that vibrating high, the plunge beyond time that comes only when you submerge yourself beneath the waterline of amplified sound. We were addicts, in a way, but also adept, enlightened by a noise most people considered no more than a pleasant distraction. What was left for us but to practice our art of listening? — Ann Powers

For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue. — John Cage

If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again. — Keith Jarrett

I don't put categories on music, myself. So either people go with it or they don't, and sometimes the names sound a little silly. — Chaz Bundick

Personally, I love the cookie monster grunts. I like how they alienate listeners. We sound the way we sound. We're individuals. We don't all like the same music. Everybody contributes their own influences, style, and history. — David Pajo

Any young boy can nowadays explain human flight - mechanistically: " ... and to climb you shove the throttle all the way forward and pull back just a little on the stick ... " One might as well explain music by saying that the further over to the right you hit the piano the higher it will sound. The makings of a flight are not in the levers, wheels, and pedals but in the nervous system of the pilot: physical sensations, bits of textbook, deep-rooted instincts, burnt-child memories of trouble aloft, hangar talk. — Wolfgang Langewiesche

I really enjoy writing lyrics, I enjoy harmonies and I enjoy hearing the organic side of production because I have to do so much non- organic for a living for other artists, it's just a break for me, for my ears and it confuses people that think my music is supposed to sound like the stuff I do for my day job, but that's just people that don't know me. — Butch Walker

Hip hop started in NY so it's important that New Yorkers realise that to talk about NY music and its sound should not be a small-minded conversation. Music is supposed to evolve. It's supposed to be going through changes, it's not supposed to sound exactly the same as what it did when it started. NY hip hop has to be allowed to move on and grow and expand. — Nas

She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes. — Alexander McCall Smith

I love the universality of music and how it can viscerally connect people from culture to culture, regardless of anything. It kind of levels everything out and connects us. That universal sound thing is a big deal to me. — Alanis Morissette

Live in rooms full of light. Avoid heavy food. Be moderate in the drinking of wine. Take massage, baths, exercise, and gymnastics. Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water. Change surroundings and take long journeys. Strictly avoid frightening ideas. Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements. Listen to music. — Aulus Cornelius Celsus

Lord, send Your life throughout the entire church. Visit Your church; restore sound doctrine and holy, earnest living. Take away from professing Christians their love of frivolities, their attempts to meet the world on it's own ground, and give back the old love of the doctrines of the Cross and Christ. May free grace and dying love again be the music that refreshes the church and makes her heart exceeding glad. — Charles Spurgeon

Doing something like that, quite radically changing your approach to sound in one go, could leave you high and dry. It's happened before where people have changed direction and then everyone's stopped liking their music. — Tom Jenkinson

You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together. — Brian Eno

When you make music you do it for the right reason: love. Love is the desire of well being, desire to heal the wounded, the person in pain, the person who has problems - to touch the person who needs love. The love inside you manifests through sound, vibration and embraces everyone in the room. — Pepe Romero

If you're going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you've got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you'll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won't sound good to those who know piano - or to yourself. — Dean Koontz

I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. — Beck

It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life. — Joseph Campbell

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you're breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. — Ruth Ozeki

It is really amazing to be able to do cinematic, big feature style film music on a weekly basis and do it in LA, on a big scoring stage, on a studio lot, and do it with the right players and make it sound great. — Christopher Lennertz

The most uplifting music in the world is that of Mother Natures orchestra.
Sit atop a hill or mountain, with a fabulous view and listen ...
Hear the winds song, the birds chorus, and the far off sound of childrens laughter and song and the sounds of life that you can soundtrack to your own playlists. — Michelle Geaney

There is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. — Thomas Browne

Sometimes silence become the most excruciating sound; sometimes the mind becomes a musical symphony of clouded thoughts, questions and clarifications but the vocals fail to present the sound of conversation. — Sumrit Shahi

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimings, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit's going. Because she'd meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won't there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused, and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? — Truman Capote

Shadows of Shadows passing... It is now 1831... and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless. — Edgar Allan Poe

Man is a musical being. His origin is in the spoken Word. By sound was he sustained and by music he evolved. One day he will recognize music as a vital factor in the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual evolution of the whole human race. — Corinne Heline

I don't know if it's my music, my lyrics, my sound, and knowing the music business the way I do-all I can say is, my career has lasted way longer than I expected. — Barry White

I remember I did quite a lot of interviews when the book and the CD came out, and I did a drivetime interview for Radio London or something. You wouldn't immediately associate the music on Ocean Of Sound with drivetime radio, but people found things that they liked, and the DJ was playing some records at 5 o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday.The man who was playing them said to me, "That Peter Brotzmann track, it's like having your head boiled in acid." — David Toop

I love music/sounds that have a passion, a fire, an energy I can connect with. I love angry sounding beat tracks, dark sounds for sure but I also love delicate sounds, they both connect I think. Discharge back in 1980 was a big explosion in sound for me to hear the anger and the energy, still an influence on me. Miles Davis has been an influence, as much as John Coltrane, Brian Eno, John Hassel. So much around me has influenced me: my everyday life, everything around me, the family, etc ... It has an impact. — Mick Harris

It reminded him of the Sound of Music. Myron liked the ole Julie Andrews musical well enough. who didn't? but he always found one song particularly dumb. One of the classics, actually. My Favorite Things. The song made no sense. Ask a zillion people to list their absolute favorite things, and how many of them are going to list doorbells for crying out loud.
You know what, Milly, I love doorbells. To hell with strolling on a quiet beach, or reading a great book, or making love or seeing a broadway musical. Doorbells, Milly, doorbells really punch my ticket. Sometimes I just run up to people's houses and press their doorbells and, well, I think i am man enough to admit I shutter. — Harlan Coben

The interview went well. I found him warm but not eager, friendly but slightly impersonal, and he answered all questions concerning music with an engaging straightforwardness. Nonmusical questions he either evaded with the skill of an expert, or ignored, apparently from lack of interest in the subjects broached. Already he had the gift of fielding impertinent questions by offering quotable evasions instead. For instance, I remember asking him if he was a religious person. He replied that he didn't want to talk about religion.
"Why not?" I pursued.
"Because my music is so very odd already that I see no reason to make myself sound any odder. — Philip Glass

I'm not going to say I'm not a fan, but I'm a fan of house music, essentially, and kind of indie, and I was always into the kind of sub-pop Seattle Mud Honey and Pearl Jam kind of sound. But my kind of big love was house music ever since I was 15/16, going to raves when I was 15 or 16 years old and not going to school, like a naughty boy. — Nick Frost

When you have two notes from two different performances Auto-Tuned, it sounds like a car horn. And then you add harmonies, and it starts to sound like baby seals honking. - Tom Lord-Alge on Auto-Tune — Greg Milner

The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes. — Douglas Adams

My music is just fresh. Everybody say it's a breath of fresh air because it's not like the normal Houston sound you would hear. I am from Houston and I use that same slang and I carry myself the same way as a Houstonian and I'm a Houston dude born and raised, but the music is a lil bit different due to the things I've seen and the things I've learned and put that into my music. — Short Dawg

Recording in Nashville was absolutely essential to get the sound, the musicians, the atmosphere, the warmth ... There are just cult places like that in the world, like Chicago for the blues or New York for jazz. Nothing sounds the same in Nashville as it does elsewhere. Nashville is the Mecca of country music and everyone knows it. — Roch Voisine

The universe sings a deep, eternal song, sound in waves, in deep sighs, in whispers, in swirling chords and rising, falling tones. The music of the worlds, weaving in a pattern that is both chaos and order, both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end. — Jessica Khoury

I still absolutely love 'The Sound of Music' and anything with Julie Andrews in it. — Kristin Scott Thomas

When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound. — Eric Betzig

She was surprised that her hands had not forgotten, that somewhere in her mind, after a year of darkness and slavery, music was still alive and breathing. That somewhere, between the notes, was Sam. She forgot about time as she drifted between pieces, voicing the unspeakable, opening old wounds, playing and playing as the sound forgave and saved her. — Sarah J. Maas

(regarding the prelude from suite two) ... The key is minor, the three notes a tragic triad. The tones move closer and closer to a harrowing vision, weaving spiter-like, relentlessly gathering sound into thighter concentric circle that come to an abrupt stop. Nothing fills the empty space. A tiny prayer is uttered. — Eric Siblin

People of talent resemble a musical instrument more closely than they do a musician. Without outside help, they produce not a single sound, but given even the slightest touch, and a magnificent tune emanates from them. — Franz Grillparzer

running to and fro with trays of refreshments. Odo, who knew that his mother lived in the Duke's palace, had vaguely imagined that his father's death must have plunged its huge precincts into silence and mourning; but as he followed the abate up successive flights of stairs and down long corridors full of shadow he heard a sound of dance music below and caught the flash of girandoles through the antechamber doors. The thought that his father's death had made no difference to any one in the palace was to the child so much more astonishing than any of the other impressions crowding his brain, that these were scarcely felt, and he passed as in a dream through rooms where servants were quarrelling over cards and waiting-women rummaged in wardrobes full of perfumed finery, to a bedchamber in which a lady dressed in weeds sat disconsolately at supper. "Mamma! Mamma!" he cried, springing — Edith Wharton

I always take care to have interesting chord progressions, because you can have the best sound design in the club, and you'll kill it in the club, but in five years, kids will have better sound design. But if your music is good, you'll always be able to listen to it, even in 20 or 50 years. — Zedd

There is an unseen sweetness in the stomach's emptiness. We are lutes. When the sound box is filled, no music can come forth. When the brain and the belly burn from fasting, every moment a new song rises out of the fire. The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you spring up the steps before you ... — Rumi

And a naked woman was waiting for him on it. Oh, crap. He'd forgotten all about Ellen, but Marcus's winery manager obviously hadn't forgotten about him. If things had gone differently tonight - way differently - he knew he would have been psyched to find her already stripped down and ready for him. Only, after meeting Chloe, Chase was about as unpsyched by Ellen's naked presence in the house as he could be. Ellen's eyes were wide as she looked between him and Chloe. Clearly, surprise had her frozen in place on the bed as it took her a minute to remove her iPod headphones. Obviously, the music had masked the sound of Chase and Chloe's conversation in the living room, and Ellen had had no idea that Chase wouldn't be walking through the bedroom door alone. — Bella Andre

The dream world of sleep and the dream world of music are not far apart. I often catch glimpses of one as I pass through a door to the other, like encountering a neighbor in the hallway going into the apartment next to one's own. In the recording studio, I would often lie down to nap and wake up with harmony parts fully formed in my mind, ready to be recorded. I think of music as dreaming in sound. — Linda Ronstadt

But the idea of taking things and mixing them together is what I do in my music. I take hip-hop, R&B, pop, dance, funk and soul and mix it all together to get my own sound. — Jennifer Lopez

The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts - a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart. — Marie Rutkoski

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create
so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. — Pearl S. Buck

You think back to Tele players, and James Burton was the one who started it all. He inspired Roy Nichols (guitar for Merle Haggard & the Strangers), Don Rich (guitar for Buck Owens & the Buckaroos), and guys like that to push the envelope and expand on that sound ... I really identify with that kind of thinking ... those guys to me are the reason why any of us do this.. — Brad Paisley

And every day there is music. One dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright. Then slowly the music will sink down until at last there remains one lonely voice, then a great hoarse breath, the sun, the sound of the picks in the silence.
And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this country. Just twelve mortal men who are together. — Carson McCullers

I would never try and play like Harry James, because I don't like his tone - for me. It's just white. You know what I mean? He has what we black trumpet players call a white sound. But it's for white music ... I can tell a white trumpet player, just listening to a record. There'll be something he'll do that'll let me know that he's white. — Miles Davis

You hear lots of notes, don't you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there's not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul of the sound, comes from the spaces in-between. — David Mutti Clark

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves ... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions. — Jean-Paul Sartre

The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply! — Stephen King

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. — Joseph Conrad

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great. — Ikue Mori

But I couldn't block out the sound of his voice. "Hayden wasn't the son I expected to have," he said. "I'd imagined playing catch in the yard, watching football on the weekends, going fishing. The things I'd done with my dad; the things I do with Ryan. It was the only kind of relationship I knew how to have with a son." His voice cracked. "But my second son didn't enjoy any of those things. He loved music and video games and computers. I didn't know how to talk to him. And now I'll spend the rest of my life wishing I'd learned how." He lowered his head, as if he were trying to hide the fact that he was crying. — Michelle Falkoff

I wanted to give people a taste of my own music through the sound and style of my covers. — Birdy

Of course, if Saint Peter could come out today upon these streets below he would find all he could wish, voices from nowhere, music from unpopulated boxes, men ascending divine distances in gas balloons, and traveling at the speed of sound, apparitions from nowhere appear on the screen; the sick are raised from the dead, life is prolonged so that every detail of pain may be relished, the blind are given eyes and the cripples forced to walk, and there is an item which can blow a city of the beloved enemy into a place where their sins will be brought home to them, with of course as much noise as the trumpets on the walls of Jericho — William Gaddis

If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet that when B.B. King is playing the blues and when he is feeling the blues, the neural signatures are very similar. (Of course there will be differences, too, and part of the scientific hurdle will be subtracting out the processes involved in issuing motor commands and listening to music, versus just sitting on a chair, head in hands, and feeling down.) And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to. — Daniel J. Levitin

People get to a certain age and success that they stop being curious. I'm still curious because I haven't really had that success. I've never done a record to catch whatever the latest sound is. It's my love of music, eclectic-ness, and the music that I heard my entire life that seeps in. That's what you're hearing. — Jill Sobule

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. — Albert Einstein

She smiled. Her skin looked whiter than he recalled, and dark spidery veins were beginning to show beneath its surface. Her hair was still the color of spun silver and her eyes were still green as a cat's. She was still beautiful. Looking at her, he was in London again. He saw the gaslight and smelled the smoke and dirt and horses, the metallic tang of fog, the flowers in Kew Gardens. He saw a boy with black hair and blue eyes like Alec's, heard violin music like the sound of silver water. He saw a girl with long brown hair and a serious face. In a world where everything went away from him eventually, she was one of the few remaining constants.
And then there was Camille. — Cassandra Clare

The collective love for music and poetry and just the brotherhood of sound. And it's still kind of flowing through me and I attribute that to the team. — Anthony Kiedis

The things I see every day inspire my sound and lyrics, like certain people and situations that stick out in my mind. There are also certain musicians I love whose music and styles inspire me. — Birdy

If I'm going to buy a new guitar, I take it to a good 'hot' room, like a tiled bathroom, and listen to the wood. If tone comes off the neck, you can bet it's gonna sound beautiful through an amp — Richard Betts

When my parents fought, I'd run up to my room, put on The Sound of Music, open the window and sing out. My voice was my escape. I saw it as a way out. — Christina Aguilera